


like a force to be reckoned with

by amessofgaywords



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, a dani character study for the most part, a whole hecka poetic feeling gunk, can't believe it took me this long honestly, i have given damie a foster child, slightly canon non-compliant ending, the claytons: manchester's most reliable florists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:21:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28223097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amessofgaywords/pseuds/amessofgaywords
Summary: There’s something real and a home between them, too. So when Jamie sheepishly suggests heading to Vermont in winter, seeing Christmas there,planninga Christmas Dani is worrying about even getting to feel, she agrees. One day at a time, after all, is a very young way to live, and Dani never feels younger than when Jamie is touching her. When Jamie’s smile gets wider, she thinks of roots and the depth needed of them to survive, and she allows it when Jamie passes a storefront with a daydream so evident on her face it might as well be painted on.or dani finds a way to fill up the soil: with love, future, and horrible tea.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 3
Kudos: 60





	like a force to be reckoned with

**Author's Note:**

> oh look at that, a dani character study. of sorts. actually this is just the product of an hour and fifteen minutes of rambling thoughts. 
> 
> title from atlas: two by sleeping at last.

Never in a million years did Dani see herself flying to England just shy of her twenty-ninth birthday, running from a life that felt like a daydream in every mirror she looked in to a life she had never once considered before for more than a second. She didn’t picture flying back less than a month later, either. With a roguish gardener’s hand locked in hers, Jamie’s callouses rubbing gentle _we’re both here_ s into the panic under her skin.

After _the night_ they stayed at Bly for a week or so. Cleaning things up. Arranging, then attending, Hannah’s funeral. Lighting candles in a chapel, Jamie sweeping and pruning and boxing things up, so much _quiet_ Dani thought she might drown in it. At night, Jamie’s arms around her waist and their legs tangled together, the small tight grip of her sign number one that she wasn’t going to let her go.

Henry came back and did the background work. He packed suitcases and bought plane tickets and told the children that maybe American public school would be more stimulating than Bly’s schoolroom, and they seemed to agree. He handed Owen and Dani and Jamie hefty severance checks that all of them denied until he had practically forced them down their throats. He seemed, for once, to be fully present and ready to take on the life of _uncle caretaker_ he’d had forced upon him little more than two years prior.

Owen went home and packed his own bags and left for Paris and then it was Dani and Jamie in Jamie’s truck, driving into Bly and spending one night in Jamie’s mostly-empty flat, a night that Dani spent wide awake staring at a shelf full of plants and wondering when the feeling of being watched was going to stop. Then, to the airport, boarding a plane.

To California first. Jamie squinted at the sun and turned her nose up at the sticky heat of early Los Angeles summer. Dani liked it when she wore her denim cutoffs and short short shirts. They picked out a decent rental car, and they drove.

Driving with Jamie was like something out of a storybook, somewhat akin to waking up next to Jamie and kissing Jamie and looking over while she was picking out groceries and seeing Jamie staring at her with a dimpled, shy smile. Dani had gotten used to swallowing things and flinching away from the commitment of _future._ With Eddie, it had never been wanted. With Jamie, all she does is want. Want and want courses through her, and not just for the nighttime, candlelight things – though she _wants_ for that too – but for the way Jamie’s lips are sticky when she’s finished one of those energy drinks she seems to like so much or the curve of her hands on the steering wheel, shouting _bloody fucks trying to kill me, you know, this really is driving on the wrong side of the road._

They go north to the redwoods, Jamie spending a worshipful handful of days covered in green and moss and towering shapes she feels at home in. Dani wishes she had a camera and vows to buy one on their next department store stop. Then, east, stubbornly avoiding Iowa at Dani’s instruction. Jamie doesn’t ask questions but Dani tells her anyway.

Tells her about her mother’s stained wine glasses and too-sweet perfume on every velour surface in their stubbornly-sixties style home. She talks about Eddie’s glasses that burned away in the bonfire and the way they reflected what Dani had been driving towards her whole life but hadn’t really been seeing the steel bars of. She talks about Judy’s warmth and the little bits of guilt she still feels pulling on her, how she still really doesn’t want to visit. Jamie says okay.

Jamie talks too, sometimes, late at night, more to keep herself awake on empty roads than anything, Dani thinks. A little about Mikey, here and there, and her dad, how she thought high of him until she didn’t anymore. Some about the first girl she kissed behind the dumpster in secondary school before she got moved to a new foster family. Bad men she didn’t like and pretty gardens she did, the first plant she ever grew: a peperomia.

In the talking, Dani finds a home in the crevices of Jamie. The little rough edges and the callouses she likes running her fingers over so much. Jamie burrows into Dani’s softness and the curl of her hair and stays there – and say what you will about good things being borne out of tragedy, the necessity of closeness after something like _that night_ and the embers of rage licking at the base of Dani’s spine, but:

There’s something real and a home between them, too. So when Jamie sheepishly suggests heading to Vermont in winter, seeing Christmas there, _planning_ a Christmas Dani is worrying about even getting to feel, she agrees. One day at a time, after all, is a very young way to live, and Dani never feels younger than when Jamie is touching her. When Jamie’s smile gets wider, she thinks of roots and the depth needed of them to survive, and she allows it when Jamie passes a storefront with a daydream so evident on her face it might as well be painted on.

\---

There are things, also. Impediments, you might call them. Like mirrors, which Dani shies away from again. Like water, big bodies of it, that hurt to stare too long at and they try to avoid. The interior of the country, while full of corn and big balls of twine, is safe. Safer than the coast and the way something that isn’t Dani inside of Dani is trying, again, desperately, to sink.

In the beginning, Dani dreams in all black and white of people she’s never seen before, and when she tries her hardest to forget her faceless nightmares she thinks she might have liked Viola, the Lady in the Lake. Strong and stubborn and unforgiving; like Jamie in the best ways. But Jamie is soft and patient and yielding when she needs to be, like the surface tension on a pond breaking to allow a chest to sink to the bottom and swallowing it up afterwards. Dani’s internal monologue features metaphors that compare her far too often to sixteenth century women. It scares her.

But time soothes things. Enough states and nights and days pass and by the time winter rolls around, Dani doesn’t feel quite so close to dying anymore. Jamie’s hands are life preservers and her smile is a hot air balloon and Dani sees every good thing as another reason to keep floating. It takes some broken crying and more than one useless nighttime walk. Some time with Jamie banishing ghosts with her hands like she had all those nights ago – feeling like a lifetime – kissing away what Dani left behind in Iowa. It takes funneling rage into passion and a blind fury that makes Jamie whisper “blimey” against her collarbones. But Dani does it. She banishes another ghost. 

For now, anyway.

\---

A storefront in Jamie’s daydreams that Dani finds herself acquiescing to. She drags her down Main Street, past the bookstore that Jamie’s been finding used books in for the past two weeks while they shift from motel room to car backseat to motel room again. Past a little bakery that Dani loves the coffee from. Through a quaint little place called Manchester – different from Jamie’s old Manchester, no coal mines here, the air is clean – and to a cute little orange place. _For sale. Lease._ Not renting, not owning, somewhere in between. _Does Viola lease her body?_ Thoughts she’d rather not follow to the end.

“What do you think?” Jamie stands behind Dani, wraps her arm around her middle, nibbles on her ear. Too much for outside on a public street, but maybe, just maybe, the smallest and quietest rebellion they can muster makes all the difference. Besides, this is Manchester, and they’re already regulars at the diner down the street.

Dani thinks, perhaps, it’s time to stop running. “You need roots, don’t you, my little flower.”

Jamie growls. “Don’t call me little, you gnome. _We_ are the same height.”

Dani pats Jamie on the head. “You’re little, babe.” She looks at the store. “What’d you wanna call it?”

Jamie licks her lips, looks it up and down. It takes the press of her rough hand to the red molding and a tick of the clock: “the Leafling.”

Dani cocks her head. “I like that.” Thinks, _the beauty of it lies in its mortality._ Thinks, _is that what you think of me now?_ Thinks, _stop thinking these things. Not now._

Jamie grins at her “Is that a yes?” To Jamie, a “yes.” To the voice in her head, _not yet._

\---

Henry’s severance checks, cashed. Business loans, leases signed, licenses acquired, much grumbling on Jamie’s part, wholesale distributors fished out of backwoods gardening circles that Jamie finds herself right at home in. Dani buys a shiny business ledger at a paper goods store. Jamie finds a vintage open-and-closed sign and hangs it on the window, gets decals drawn up and printed and hung by a couple of local bored teenagers. They do it cause she pays them the first day, but they come back to finish the job because they like Dani’s iced tea.

“See, this how it’s meant to be served.”

“Yeah, okay, Poppins. You’re just covering for the fact you can’t make a proper brew to save your life. Or mine.”

A decision made quickly: “You don’t know what I’d do to save your life.”

“Keep posturing, Poppins, but I know what those hands can do with a kettle.” And to lighten the mood: “and with other things, too.”

They dance around three words until they don’t, or Dani doesn’t. A night like every other, only Jamie’s impressed some fancy downtown Burlington lawyer who wants to place a whole order for his niece’s wedding. Their first wedding. Jamie, usually at home in the dirt and leaves, looks for all her life like there’s no place she’d rather be than discussing the finer points of different colors of carnations. And Dani loves her. Loves her smile and dedication and the mulch smudged on her cheek that never really wipes off. 

She says so, when the lawyer is gone and Jamie’s sweeping stray petals from the floor. “You know, I love you, by the way.”

These words hadn’t meant much when she’d said them to Eddie. She had never really said them at all, actually. Just waited patiently, twisting her fingers together and checking and double-checking all the exits, until he said it first, and then doing the perfunctory thing. Did she mean it? Sure. Maybe. In the way she means it to Owen when he calls from Paris – grief less heavy on his voice every time – and the kids the couple of times they send postcards. Not… not the way she means it with Jamie.

With every bone in her body, even the marrow. With all she has and all she pours into at a given point. With the love in her body and the rage, too, the gravity of it threatening to pull her under but she fights; with that peculiar ability Jamie has to break surface tension and burrow roots deep into her dreams. She means she wants Jamie in the morning and the afternoon and night – never felt that with Eddie. It means she misses her when she’s gone, even when she’s just at the farmer’s market – never wanted Eddie home in the evenings. It means that she’s stopped comparing everything with Jamie to everything with Eddie, the surest sign that the past is past and the present exists.

When she says it, she means it. Jamie leans over her broom, clears her throat. “Dani, I… thank you.” Awkward. Grubby confusion. Jamie. Dani smiles. 

“You don’t… I know what’s, with us, I know. You don’t have to say it back.” _Yet. But please say it some day and mean it because if you don’t I don’t know what I’ve been fighting gravity for this whole time._

Jamie smiles so wide it threatens to break her face and maybe they don’t need the sun for the plants anymore, if Jamie will just smile like that the rest of her life. “Okay.” She keeps sweeping and orders Thai that night without Dani even having to tell her that’s what she wants. She loves Dani in all her little Jamie ways and it’s enough.

Until an afternoon Jamie flips the sign early, drags a couple of small trees inside – rain later, they get a paper delivered in the mornings and it tells them the weather and that fact alone is enough to make Dani dig down deeper for even more roots, stop floating like a forgotten dress in the water – and then Jamie disappears into the back room. Comes back with a little clay pot, a little unopened flower.

“I’m not sick of you, at all,” Jamie says.

“I’m actually pretty in love with you, it turns out,” Jamie says.

But Jamie’s saying _forever_ and _lifetime guarantees_ and _a while if you’ll have me._ Jamie is saying _fuck your Lady in the Lake, make me your lady in the flower shop with dirt on her face and leaves in her hair and her suspenders around her waist._ Jamie is saying _I have never said these words to anyone else the way I’m saying them now, to you, and this is the second time I’m trusting anyone like this, and both times it's been you._

A year, it took, for Dani to know fully and cementedly that she wants to be the one Jamie trusts for the rest of her life. This is, perhaps, the ultimate surface tension to be broken. That this is not an anchor or a trap but the lightest feather of her life, and Jamie has broken something Dani has no intention of putting back together.

_Everyone is work and effort,_ Dani thinks while Jamie holds her that night, while a bloom reaches for the moon. _And once in a blue goddamned moon, one dumb, grumpy gardener is worth it. Isn’t she._

A silent voice deep in her answers the not-question with a resolute, acquiescing nod. This voice is and is not Dani’s, and this is the first shift.

\---

Jamie takes care of the plants. Jamie’s always taken care of the plants. But when Dani waters them and feels the life growing under her fingertips she feels a bit like she used to in a classroom with twenty children or more, grinning when they master their multiplication tables and deciding resolutely that this is where she belongs and where she can do some actual _good._

Dani likes watching the plants grow when Jamie waters them as well. Often thinks of a white flower so perfect, so something, on the gates of a manor far away from here, and the way she’d bloomed for Jamie that night. The one night before the horrible night. Thinks Jamie sliding mugs of tea across the kitchen counter at her might be a very different act of watering, and is thankful for it: the little things that are keeping her alive.

\---

So Dani goes on, there’s a routine of sorts, of: work in the shop, and life with Jamie, and everything is okay and the _rage_ inside isn’t so much horrible as it is a part of everything else, a part of the sun rising and the flowers growing.

Until Mrs. Heron, the wife of the principal at the local elementary school, meets Dani in the grocery store, says one of their fifth grade teachers is retiring. And Dani used to teach fourth grade, but fifth grade isn’t that different; a different part of history, slightly different math, reading, writing, and fifth graders are older and wiser and maybe, if Dani wades into a lake and leaves them behind, they won’t miss her so much. A room of twenty kids and Jamie she can’t handle leaving behind, but…

“I think you should do it,” Jamie offers. “I mean, the shop’ll do fine. Couple’a people I can think to hire part-time, if I need it, and you could do with a bit of stimulation.” She prods Dani’s leg with her socked foot, sitting cross-legged across from each other on the bed. “You’ll be good at it, yeah? And I know you miss kids.”

“You’re childish enough for me,” Dani jokes, long having gotten used to the way her heart jumps when Jamie laughs. And still adjusting to the copper bands around their ring fingers, but loving it all the same as she rubs it around and around like a prayer, like a promise. Jamie grins. Little curly-haired devil.

“Keep talking like that, _Mrs. Clayton,_ and I might just have to pour glue all over you. Get myself detention for that, would I?” Dani tackles her to the bed with her lips and keeps the job in the back of her mind until July. Until she hands a smiling secretary a resume, breathes a little rough when an envelope comes back a few weeks later.

Jamie will be the first to report that Dani smiles brighter in the weeks leading up to the first day of school than she did on the day she proposed, and it’s an exaggeration, but:

When Dani asks the voice inside if this is all okay, the voice shrugs brokenly. _It is not your choice, anyway,_ a determined Dani says, and the voice believes her, if only for a moment, and that is the second shift.

\---

Shifts here and there and sometimes still a faceless face in the mirror, in the door of the shop, in the water when they’re washing dishes. But Dani doesn’t jump the way she used to. Jamie’s roots deep in her body, a home that she’s built and a job that she loves and thousand little hands in the air screaming _Mrs. Clayton, Mrs. Clayton,_ and all of it makes her push back. Kick to the surface. _Not yet. Not now._

And the voice listens. Holds back. Cocks its head patiently at the press of Jamie’s fingertips to the inside of her wrist, to the feeling of the cold metal of her ring when she’s forgotten her gloves in December. When Jamie presses those fingers against her hips in the kitchen while she’s making dinner, the voice all but disappears. It doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t have to. Dani doesn’t think she’s out of the woods yet but she’s here and her and here and there are a thousand things to look forward to when the sun rises, a thousand more things than she expected.

Shifts like cohabitation might not be the worst expected outcome. Ticking time bombs don’t ever stop, really, or go away, but with time and deft fingers and the commitment of someone with a bounty on their head maybe they can be defused.

\---

And Dani falls in love with life. The turning of the leaves in late September. Sneaking off to the bookstore to surprise Jamie with a new used paperback on birthdays, holidays, Sundays. Lemonade and iced tea – she still can’t make actual tea even though Jamie’s always trying to teach her but they’ve given up now – and the way the calendar flips. Five six seven eight nine years. Owen calls and congratulates with every passing April. _Thank God you two are here, reminding me love exists._ Sad and thinking of Hannah, beautiful elegant and dead before any of them had even heard Flora say _dead doesn’t mean gone._ Gone all the way now.

_Thank God you’re not dead yet,_ Owen says when he knows it won’t send Dani spiraling, and it doesn’t anymore. _Not yet,_ she says back. She means it. _Not yet. When I decide, now, and I can remind you of that,_ aiming a finger at the ghost in her head and using her very best teacher voice, _any time I want._ The voice raises black-and-white palms in surrender. It speaks without words. Dani calls it a voice because it communicates anyway. _Not yet,_ the voice tells her, and she believes it. She believes that when she begged – later demanded, later pleaded, and then finally decided – it listened.

Dani falls in love with her life. She opens the shop with Jamie and goes to work. There are kids who she loves and loves watching them grow, and she comes home and Jamie has been helping her own kids to grow and they swap stories about their kids over dinner, and then they get in a bed they bought together and they fall asleep together. This is what Eddie wanted, Dani thinks, and was never going to get. This is what Dani run away from and waited for and has now, and she’s monumentally lucky that _not yet_ carries as much weight as it does. More and more weight as time passes.

As it becomes more true.

\---

There’s a kid in Dani’s class named Jacob, small and slight and with a pension for getting bullied for his off-brand clothes and greasy hair. A foster kid whose foster parents never show up for conferences. When Dani tells Jamie about him, she gets quiet.

“He doin’ alright?” She means in a lot of ways, and Dani can’t answer all of the questions behind her eyes. A week later, she asks if Jacob would want to stop by the shop after school.

Jamie talks to Jacob about comic books, which he likes a lot, and math, which Jamie hates but Jacob is good at it. He explains how to do variable equations, something Dani hasn’t even taught him, and Jamie looks pained but smiles and ruffles his hair when he leaves.

“I called his social worker the other day. He’s probably going to switch homes soon.” Dani kisses across Jamie’s shoulder in _maybes_ that night. “He might not end up still in town. Just… wanted to let you know.”

Jamie, sleepy, mutters. “You baiting me, Poppins?”

“I’m asking a question.”

“By not actually asking a damn thing, I notice.” Jamie turns over and Dani charts every little line in her face, the tiny tangled curls of grey next to her temples. _Bit too old to have kids,_ Jamie would say if Dani were anyone different, but Dani is Dani, and they’ve never been… predictable. “Dani, I don’t…”

“You’re not a kid anymore, Jamie.”

“Not what I meant.” If this conversation were a choose-your-own-adventure book, Dani would cross off _mottled shoulder scar_ as one of the options directing Jamie away from what seems like a pretty obvious conclusion to this story. “I have experiences, you know.” So _bad men and their unruly hands_ is still on the list. Right up there with _bad memories._

“We’re good people and we’ll be good to him. Or anyone else.” A kiss to Jamie’s lips isn’t quite enough to convince, so Dani winds her arm around her waist and a leg around her hip. Jamie rolls her eyes. Her _trying to convince me with your body are you_ is deliberately swallowed.

The next morning, Jamie stirs milk into her tea. “I think, maybe, it’s time I banished some ghosts of my own, Poppins.” 

“You wanna make a good impression on somebody?” Teasing. The easiest kind of Jamie currency, and the kind of thing that makes her bloom like a moonflower.

“I want to leave this fuckin' world better than I came into it. You understand?”

Dani does. Dani calls the social worker later that afternoon.

\---

Dani got on a plane to England with three bags and a pair of glasses and a broken shell of a person being tugged along with her. Her own heart a carry-on piece of luggage, rattling in her chest. She wandered Europe her own brand of ghost and ended up in a house full of them, became the kind of ghost she was never smart enough not to face, just for the little girl who wanted to grow up someday and deserved to.

Along the way, a gardener came along. Along the way, Dani fell in love. Her heart settled back down and became precious cargo again, cradled in Jamie’s dirt-stained hands like something worth protecting. She didn’t ever let it go, Dani notices ten eleven twelve thirteen years later.

She’s kneeling in the bathroom staring at the full tub, and thinking of the third shift from two years ago when they brought Jacob to his room for the first time, his very own plant (a dieffenbachia) on the windowsill. And the stupidest way for this all to end:

The voice doesn’t like kids. Viola is afraid of the child in Jacob just like she’s angry at the mother in Dani.

She stares at her from the water now. Full faced. Glaring. _Not yet,_ she says to Dani.

Dani stares back and smiles. _Yes, I think. I think finally._

Viola glares again. The lock rattles in the door, Jamie’s voice in a “we’re home” chorus with Jacob’s, lugging grocery bags and the latest issue of Batman, and Dani wanders out of the bathroom to meet them with the tips of her hair wet.

Jamie makes eyes at Dani over a bag of lettuce and paper towels. _Everything good?_

Dani makes a face back. _Not yet._ She scoops Jacob into her arms, even though he’s definitely too old (and too heavy) now, and raises her eyebrows at Jamie. “Get over here.”

Jamie does, kisses her light and appreciative with a little _hmm_ and makes a comment about how Dani smells like soap. Dani laughs lightly and lets go of Jacob when he complains and runs away, _Jeez, Dani, I’m a teenager now, you know._ Dani looks at Jamie across the kitchen grinning after a kid not theirs but theirs in all the ways that matter, with a wringing smile on her face. 

_Now everything is good,_ Dani thinks and walks over to kiss her. There is now, just now, and now is enough goddamn waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> for the record, i love viola. but sometimes convenient antagonist force has to convenient antagonist force... :l
> 
> ps: manchester, vermont contains one of the best bookstores on the planet, northshire bookstore. hence the reason they live in manchester, because... i think damie would like that bookstore. i made an executive decision.
> 
> come yell at me @amessofgaywords on twitter.


End file.
